Mr. Paladino’s latest outrage

Today’s editorial: Now he’s smearing gays. So much for a campaign of substance.

Carl Paladino surrendered any pretense of waging a serious and substantive campaign for governor even before he resorted to gay bashing. There was his suggestion that what people on welfare needed most of all was to be housed in former prisons and instructed in basic hygiene. There have been statements that reeked of anti-Semitism.

Just when New York so badly needs a thoughtful dialogue about high taxes and dysfunctional government, he’s all too content with running a race based upon the rawest of emotion.

Initially, a campaign that seized upon public anger with the sad state of government in New York performed the potentially useful service of requiring politicians and voters alike to address that disgust. More recently, however, Mr. Paladino has relinquished even that claim to political legitimacy with statements and outbursts that reflect not discontent so much as hatred.

His mean-spirited statements about gays on Sunday and his clumsy attempts to clarify them on Monday stand as the most outrageous sentiments to emerge from Mr. Paladino’s mouth until, well, the next time he gets near a microphone. Tuesday’s apology does little to change the impression he’s making upon voters.

What’s worse — what Mr. Paladino said about gays or how he subsequently tried to explain his ugly remarks?

“I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option — it isn’t,” Mr. Paladino told a group of Orthodox Jewish leaders in remarks as notable for political pandering as for his assertion of his views on biology and psychology.

Just as offensive is Mr. Paladino’s idea of showing empathy for gays. First comes common sense — “My feelings on homosexuality are unequivocal. I have absolutely no problem with it whatsoever.’’

Then comes his outrage at his opponent, Andrew Cuomo, for taking his daughters to a gay pride parade.

“Exposing them to homosexuality, especially at a gay pride parade — and I don’t know if you have ever been to one, but they wear these little Speedos and they grind against each other and it’s just a terrible thing,” he said.

All that, just as ten men face charges of torturing three men in the Bronx they suspect were gay.

All that, uttered by a man who wants to lead a state where the long list of what government needs to do includes legalization of same-sex marriage. Can we believe his campaign’s insistence that he’d enforce such a law?

His apology on Tuesday, a full day after what supporters his campaign has left condemned him and abandoned him in droves, still has us wondering whom Mr. Paladino will choose to demonize next. Election Day, remember, isn’t for three more weeks.